Jim’s Woody
Ten things about the leading lady in my life
Quite simply, she’s the coolest woman I’ve ever known. Warts and all. Now for some details.
- She’s an idealist while having no tolerance for b.s.
- Witty, even caustic, but never cruel. The truth, however, can sting.
- Much smarter than me, and better read, though knowing everything can be a problem. In other words, she remembers everything, especially what I’ve done wrong.
- I love watching her, the way she moves, the twinkle in her eye, the perplexed twist of her lips while solving a problem. Oh, yes, and her long, long hair.
- Has an artsy, natural style that leans toward earth-tones, folk sources, and simplicity.
- She’s frugal but generous.
- Has never been remunerated in just compensation to her societal contributions. If she were, we’d be living in high style.
- Is one of the world’s great cooks. And that extends to the garden, though she rarely has time for the weeding. The problem is, neither do I.
- Is gifted in spades with empathy. Only she can’t understand why the rest of us can be so lacking in it.
- Should have been an astronaut.
Our little city stretches from heads to coves
When it comes to finding your way about town, you need to know more than just the names of the streets.
Eastport’s a city of islands, with Moose Island the biggest and most inhabited. It’s roughly six miles long and three wide, at the most, but that still adds up to 20 or so miles of shoreline, I’m guessing.
So people will refer to Buckman Head or Estes Head or Todd Head or Kendall Head or, for variety, Harris Point, punctuated by coves.
So there’s Broad Cove or Deep Cove, which flank Shackford Head, or Prince Cove, for instance. As well as Carrying Place, Half Moon, and Johnson coves. Plus a few more. And that’s before we get to the neighboring towns, up and down the coast, which also name places this way.
Welcome to my new world.
Do you follow a to-do list?
I thought everyone did. And then one day, at the close of Quaker worship, I casually asked the circle if anyone in the room didn’t do such a checklist. I was surprised by the number of hands that went up, even if they were a distinct minority.
How do they get everything that needs to be done, done? It’s still a mystery to me. It’s like I need a map if I’m gonna get anywhere.
My wife and I have multiplicities of such lists. The problem is keeping them all straight. Sometimes, once we find where they’ve gone missing, just trying to read the handwriting is confounding, but even guessing still helps.
For years, I kept both seasonal and monthly lists, broken down into categories of Personal, Domestic, Creative, Quaker/Spiritual, and, at times, even Computer and Astro. I eventually kept a master file on my PC for easy updating and printed out pages as needed for a clipboard.
You know, reminders of auto tag renewal, driver’s license, income tax filing, ordering firewood (and the phone number), furnace and chimney cleaning, medical exam and dental cleanups, birthdays and anniversaries, Yearly Meeting sessions, drafting our local Meeting’s State of Society report, and so on.
To that I added goals like weekend escapes, writing and publishing agendas, gardening chores, home improvements, even exercise, which never did actually happen. Reviewing these can be embarrassing.
Yes, we can regiment ourselves or else try to go with the flow, even if that means trying to put out endless fires we hadn’t planned on. The frustrating part is all the stuff that never got done – or as I’m seeing in my review, did so only years later. Others remain unfulfilled dreams or promises.
The more practical solution has been my keeping of weekly planning calendars, though a master list would still help in inserting some of the tasks. This year, I’ve gone with a smaller book – make of that what you will. I do miss the big artwork, though.
Kinisi 95
where was the silver spoon?
was it always this hard?
Science in the mirror of religion
Eternity?
What’s beyond the Big Bang!
Where they get the big boats out of the water here
Darling Ilene
perhaps you remember the one whose moon-eyed lovers were reflected within the ringing gravel } none of them yet the maid of honor or a best man’s cattle, hogs, goats grunt in discomfort, sniffing the usual rounds without any drum healing wounds at least only to burn away { somewhere in the distance
Ready for a few recent thoughts arising from all of our teleconferencing (trademark?)?
(By the way, I’m wondering if that “?)?” is a first in the English language.) (Along with opening a writing in a parenthetical mark.)
To the point: After all of this time Zooming, specifically, I’ve finally found a visual background that works for me, almost a stage setting.
In our new old house, my workstation is in what’s also my bedroom rather than somewhere up in an attic. In common with many New England homes, there’s no closet, so when the laptop’s camera is in its usual, sharp focus, my hanging clothes are in full view.
How embarrassing. Or candid. At least I’m not naked, in all my senior-citizen glory.
I’ve played with several photographic backgrounds as alternatives, but they do use up valuable bandwidth, sometimes even interfering with the signal or pixilating my face, and they get wonky if I so much as twitch.
Moving myself and the said laptop to another room gets complicated, especially when I need to reach for a book or paper (back in the earlier room) for reference. New lighting conditions are an additional consideration.
Do we all need a stage manager or producer or even a dramaturge working on our behalf, much less sound engineers? I hope not!
So the solution, where low-tech me is? Voila! Or amazement. I chanced upon the “blurred background” option on the Zoom toolbar and like it. In fact, it can even look dramatic, keeping the focus on (drumroll, please) me. Maybe I’ll keep it.
~*~
As long as we’re on the subject of Zoom, does anyone else find conversation or dialogue unnatural and awkward? There’s hesitation when we’d simply join in and then jump out contrasting to talking over each other because we have no eye contact or other non-verbal cues regarding each other. There are times I’m sure I come off cold simply because I’m stepping back to listen yet other times I no doubt seem rude piping up the same moment others do, like drivers all trying to enter an intersection at the same moment.
By the way, I do think our faces are appearing in a less harsh light than we did earlier in this transition.
For a while, it seemed we were all at less ten years older, children excluded. We looked ghastly.
~*~
I’m also discovering there are many people I recognize more by the sound of their voice than by their faces. Maybe it’s a consequence of joining a new community in the age of Covid, but there is a world of difference between individuals unmasked on my computer screen and masked (or not) somewhere out in public, often miles out of context.
How has your Zooming changed? Any advice to share? Or off-the-wall particulars?
The Puritans came to establish a utopia, not religious chaos
The conventional explanation that the Puritans migrated to New England for religious freedom misses the obvious.
When the Puritans first arrive in 1629, followed the next year with the beginning of their great flood of migration, theirs is a well-orchestrated and well-financed scheme to establish a utopia, one based on their Calvinist Protestant worldview. In many ways, it ranges well beyond the confines of religion.
Crucially, sensing that their mission could be corrupted by false teachings and practices, they squelch unorthodoxy and dissent early on. Within the first decade of their arrival along Massachusetts Bay, they banish Samuel Gorton, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson, who find refuge in Williams’ new colony of Rhode Island. Early Quaker history turns its focus there and neighboring Cape Cod, for good reason, though much also happens north of Boston in Salem, Hampton, and Dover.
Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, the Reverend John Wheelwright, also takes flight and founds the town of Exeter, on the other end of Great Bay from Dover, in New Hampshire.
Others head more or less straight to Dover. Among them is Hansard Knollys, a minister whose evolving theology will lead him to being a founder of the Baptist denomination when he returns to England. He’s not quite there yet when he formally organizes the church in Dover as a congregational society just six years after its first services. Had he been a bit clearer in his theological evolution, Dover could have established the first Baptist church in America, a year before Williams in Providence. Oh, well.
But that does leave an opening for the Quakers a decade later.
All the more, I sense that Knollys leaves enough nonconformist thought in his wake to lead some independent spirits in Dover to privately question the ongoing Puritan preaching. As my new book will note, there are hints of that in the town records – supposedly subversive thinking that has to await the arrival of the itinerant Quakers for confirmation and action.
As we’ll see, it’s a volatile mix awaiting the spark for explosion.
Jnana's Red Barn 